“Vuoi una bugia? (Do you want a lie?)” my flatmate asked me one February evening, indicating a platter with some flat, sugar-coated fritters on them.

“A lie?” I replied puzzledly. I had arrived in Turin recently with what I thought was a reasonably good level of Italian. I couldn’t, however, see the connection between the serrated-edged pastries on the kitchen table and falsehoods.

An after dinner snack and a few laughs at Piedmont’s (and Liguria’s) name for the ubiquitous fried pastries made during the Carnival period ensued. Later on, I would learn that fibs had nothing to do with the origin of their name either. That would appear to derive from the Italianisation of the Piedmontese busie and Ligurian böxie. The pastries also went by other amusing epithets elsewhere in Italy. Care for some lattughe (‘lettuces’), cenci (‘rags’) or chiacchiere (‘gossips’) anyone?

The word carnevale derives from the Latin carne levum, meaning ‘flesh farewell’. Like many Christian festivities, Carnival appears to have pagan roots. It is as much an agricultural festival as it is a religious one. Traditionally, the gargantuan feasting characterising the celebrations represented a precious last opportunity to exhaust the larder and meat supply before the food shortage imposed by the passage from winter to spring. Lent, the forty day period of piety and abstinence which follows the excesses and revelry of Carnival, coincides with what would have been a precarious time for those who depended on the land for their survival.

Bugie – or whatever you prefer to call those flaky, deep-fried sheets of sweet dough – are symbolic of this farewell to all that is grasso or ‘fat’. Using up supplies of pork – the meat of the season – and pork-derived products was an integral part of the festivities, so, in the past, they were fried in strutto or lard. Until the postwar economic boom (and subsequent anti-fat health scares!), lard was the cooking fat used by most Italians. Now people generally fry their bugie in vegetable oil. And, with the abundance of food now available year round, not to mention more relaxed attitudes to observing Lenten diet restrictions, their symbolism as a goodbye to fleshy indulgence is less obvious. Regardless, I still look forward to the time of year that bugie begin appearing in the vetrine of local pasticcerie. In fact, I’ve become so fond of these flaky, melt-in-your-mouth fritters that I’ve taken to making them myself at home. Here is a recipe, based on Pellegrino Artusi’s for making bugie, or – as he called them in the dialect of his adopted region of Tuscany – ‘rags’.